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Carleton College was founded in 1942 to provide elementary university courses in the evening for government employees. The first President was Henry Marshall Tory. At that time, the future campus was just a swamp inhabited by cows…
The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), was designed and built between 1942 and 1944.
The 1945-1946 calendar mentions the “decision to offer instruction in the subjects of First Year Applied Science and Engineering”.
The ENIAC ( Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) is designed and built at the University of Pennsylvania. Considered the grandfather of digital computers, it fills a 20-foot by 40-foot room and has 18,000 vacuum tubes.
The return of WWII veterans led to day courses and in 1946 the college acquired a five-storey, red brick building at 268 First Avenue. The building was formerly the Ottawa Ladies College and had been used as barracks for the Canadian Women’s Army Corps during the war.
Engineers at Bell Labs develop the concept of cellular technology. In an internal memo at Bell Labs, Douglas H. Ring laid the intellectual groundwork for a cellular telephone system.
The transistor is invented by scientists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley who later share the Nobel Prize. The transistor replaces vacuum tubes, serving as the foundation for the development of modern electronics and makes possible the marriage of computers and communications.
Claude Shannon publishes seminal papers on Information Theory, containing the basis for data compression (source encoding) and error detection and correction (channel encoding).
The FORTRAN programming language (for Formula Translating) is developed at IBM as an alternative to assembly language.
The college became a university in 1957. It served more than 1,500 students in a variety of programs like journalism, engineering, commerce, public administration and general arts. Source: Carleton reflects on its beginnings in the Glebe. Originally published in the April 2017 edition of the Glebe Report, by Joseph Mathieu.
